Zeus: A Journey Through Greece in the Footsteps of a God

This is a book on Greek mythology, but it's also a biography and a history. So Tom Stone retells the myths, as you might expect, but he limits himself to the ones featuring Zeus, and the retelling is shaped to tell us about Zeus as a character (or person or god, whichever works best); this is the biography. And while he's telling readers about Zeus, he's also telling us about the Greeks—and this is the history. So he starts, not in Greece, but on the Russian steppes, where the people who would eventually migrate to Greece first imagined him as a disembodied sky god. The story follows the god and the people to Greece, and traces Zeus's development through what the Greeks wanted and needed from their gods. They begin to see Zeus as less show more of a force of nature and more as a god with a personality, Zeus reinforces their spread through Greece by his liaisons/rapes in myth, and as their sense of themselves strengthens, human heroes become more prominent in myth and Zeus and the other gods become more remote.

This could have been a dry, academic treatise, but Stone is a good storyteller as well, so I enjoyed rereading the book. (Happy to find out I liked it just as much the second time around: not all books hold up to a rereading.) The subtitle makes it sound like you'll be reading a travelogue, and there are bits of one: Stone and his wife traveled through Greece to various sites important in Zeus's mythology, and he talks about that trip as well. But the focus is mainly on the historical Zeus and how the Greeks influenced his development, which is a different approach than many books on mythology, and I found it really interesting. show less

Chronology in beginning is outstanding summary of Hellenic history. Well written, fascinating reading. Outstanding turns of phrase.

Was a moderately interesting read...all of the Greek myths told via a biography of Zeus, with the author and his wife telling of their visits to the modern day locale of some of the tales.